Our comic heroes have died before growing old

The childish stars of 'The Dandy’ have been vanquished by the po-faced
Americans

Our comic book heroes were never really heroic. Even Desperate Dan – who shaved with a blowtorch, slept on a pillow full of rubble and could lift a cow with one hand – was a bit soft in the headPhoto: PA

Only three days to go until Desperate Dan clomps off into the online sunset. On Tuesday – the 75th anniversary of its birth – the last print edition of The Dandy will go on sale. Its publisher, DC Thomson, insists this is not the end of the road for the granite-chinned cowboy. On the contrary, it chirrups optimistically, this is the start of an “exciting” new online adventure for Dan and his longstanding colleagues Bananaman and Korky the Cat. And perhaps they are right. Circulation figures for traditional children’s comics have fallen off a cliff in recent years. (The Dandy’s has shrunk from 2 million in its heyday to less than 8,000 today.) Even in cartoonland, there is only so long you can keep peddling wildly in mid-air.

The reality is that the children who once would have read The Dandy are now glued to a screen instead. Television started the exodus; the internet has fatally accelerated it. The only children’s magazines that do well on the newsstand these days are those that are tied in to a film franchise (Spiderman), TV series (Peppa Pig) or computer game (Moshi Monsters).

DC Thomson has clearly calculated that it is better to join them than be pulverised by them. An interactive, online version – with games and animated bits and whatever other gew-gaws Thomson can cook up – might be what’s needed to put the gravy back into the cow pie.

Yet even if this is true – and Dan is indeed facing a new dawn – it feels like a valedictory moment. Like Shakespeare or the King James Bible, DC Thomson’s creations have left their footprints all over British language and culture. Millions and millions of children – pretty much anyone raised in Britain between 1940 and 1980 – grew up reading The Dandy and its more famous stablemate, The Beano.

Even those of us who never found the jokes all that funny (being a high-minded girl, I preferred the less farcical Bunty) absorbed them into our collective imagination. Plug remains a byword for ugliness. Billy Whizz lives on as slang for amphetamines. And Lord Snooty has found his modern incarnation in Dave Snooty and his Pals, the Private Eye strip mocking our Old Etonian rulers.

Now that I have children of my own, growing up in a much more global culture, I can appreciate how peculiarly British those creations were. For one thing, our comic book heroes were never really heroic. Even Desperate Dan – who shaved with a blowtorch, slept on a pillow full of rubble and could lift a cow with one hand – was a bit soft in the head. For another, they were all children – or at least irredeemably childish. Anarchic, wilful, unable to resist either curiosity or temptation, they were engaged in constant, low-level sabotage of the adult world.

By contrast, there is nothing juvenile about American comic book heroes. Superman, Spiderman, Batman: they are all physically huge, weighed down by moral responsibility, as po-faced as a disappointed dad. They spend their lives fighting the forces of evil; whereas Beryl the Peril and Dennis the Menace are the forces of evil – or at least, of mischief. Puckishly cheerful and light on their feet, they never repent or learn from mistakes.

Alas, the American superheroes have (as usual) won the day. This is not just because of their innate powers of invincibility. They managed early on to escape the comic book format – diversifying into films, TV series and merchandise in a way that even Dennis the Menace, DC Thomson’s most famous creation, could never quite pull off.

Children like to get to know a fictional character from lots of angles: they want to be able to read the book, see the film, wear the costume and break the toy. American companies, with their surer grasp of pop culture, have always understood that.

I hope it isn’t too late for Britain’s cartoon characters to claw back some ground. They are our modern-day Lords of Misrule; miniature reminders of our national naughty streak.